Ethics is (infuriatingly) unique in this aspect.
Discussion of beliefs that do not make observable predictions is unproductive (Making Beliefs Pay Rent), and discussion of beliefs that do not make ANY predictions about ANYTHING EVER is literally meaningless (the different versions of reality are not meaningfully distinguishable).
That said… ethics poses an exception to this rule, because although ethical beliefs don’t make predictions (for anything ever), they still have implications for how you should behave. This is entirely unique to ethical beliefs.
As much as I’d love to do away with the infinite rambling debates over predictionless beliefs, ethics stands in the way. They are beliefs that pay rent not in the currency of predictions to be used to achieve your goals, but in the form of the very goals themselves—an offer so irresistible to instrumental rationalists such as myself, that we will trample far past our ordinary epistemic boundaries to grasp at it.
Hi, I’m a new user who stumbled across this so I figured it would be worth commenting. I came here via effective altruism and have now read a decent chunk of the Sequences so LW is not totally new to me as of reading this but still.
I definitely wish this introduction had been here when I first decided to take a look at LessWrong—it was a little confusing to figure out what the community was even supposed to be. The introductory paragraph is excellent for communicating what the core is that the community is built around, and the following sections seem super efficient at getting us up to speed on what LW is.
I find the How To Get Started section very confusing. It seems at first like a list of things you need to do before participating on the forum, but I guess it’s supposed to be rough progression of things you can do to become more of a LessWronger considering it has attend a meet-up on there? The paragraph afterwards also doesn’t make any sense to me—it says there’s not a tonne but you’ll probably be missing something on your first day… but it seems to me like it IS a tonne (the Sequences alone are really long!) and on your first day you won’t have done ANY of them (except general reading). Maybe you meant to say that it’s a list of possible things to get yourself clued up, but you don’t need to do a ton of it?
Finally, I already commented with no idea it would be moderated so heavily, so including that info is definitely helpful—plus the information about standards of content is just generally super useful to know from the start anyway.
Overall this seems really good and gets the important questions answered quickly. Honestly there’s not anything I wish was there that isn’t, or anything that is there that seems unnecessary. Great work 👍